Gyeongju

Yesterday morning I was greeted at random by one of the university security guards, who smiled, bowed, and offered up such a polite peace-be-upon-you that I could barely respond to him. The baby had cried a bit the night before—we’ve both caught the same terrible cold, but as usual my wife’s implacable immune system has left her completely unscathed—and I was still smarting from the wounds leftover from battling random strangers on the internet, so it was not until I found myself conversing with one of my nicer students a few hours later that I realized how foul my mood was.

I was out walking last night through a very warm and pleasant Spring evening, striding along the empty streets, singing and dancing and letting my inner dionysian loose, mostly to the music of John Lee Hooker, when I suddenly discovered that election season had come to Gyeongju.

The sign reads: “Hwak! Bakkooja! Gyeongju-ai Say-Lo-Oon Seontaek 7 Kim Seokgi”

Hwak! (what the hell does hwak mean?) Let’s Change! Gyeongju’s New Choice 7 Kim Seokgi

Since moving to Korea two and a half, going on three years ago, I’ve treated my experience here as a temporary one, a first step on the way to something better, a necessary bother, and my goal had always been to get the hell out as soon as possible, and then never return, even after I married a Korean woman, and even after I found myself with a good job. I assumed consistently that almost anything else was better than the job security, family happiness, and general growing prosperity and progress I experienced here, and that it would be better to move back to America, or some other country, rather than deal with the garbage in Korea.

A walk in the wet tar, in the rain, with my shoes and socks soaked through, and the brown furrows of rice fields drenched in mirrors—the vast cement hospital rising like a neo-Wagnerian castle out of its upside-down double, interrupted by a few rolls of sallow hay, scraps of blue tarps, shark-chewed husks of stained styrofoam. Few sidewalks on this walk. Much danger & discomfort.

In a special sort of room on the library’s first floor, beyond the beeping security turnstiles and the computers which you use, with your ID, to check out a specific chair in any one of a number of enormous reading rooms—bare, practical, fluorescent, uncomfortable affairs, guaranteed to leave you with an aching neck and back if you stay for too long—but in this special room, I sit for over three and a half hours, and write, and it is pleasant. I have not yet explored the stacks. I don’t even know where they are.

Gyeongju. Daylight, the week of Lunar New Year, with the traffic grumbling along the five-lane highway for over an hour now. Break in the endless haze of January, with so much fog in the air you’d just as soon expect an army of flower knights to heave themselves up from their great grass barrows, to come charging, on their horses, over the wide sallow fields, beside all the old palaces reconstituting their molecules from the aether, pillars rising, gables curving into Eastern grins.